


The Giving Up We Do Invisibly

by aderyn



Series: Compounds or Stars [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221b, ASiP, Gen, Post-Reichenbach/reunion, transactions with the divine, what we owe, you have no idea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-26
Updated: 2012-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-31 18:00:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/346885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love is the anticipation of forgiveness: But that’s only an aphorism.</p>
<p>When did John learn to forgive?  </p>
<p>“It wasn’t when he broke and followed the long-legged, eminent stalk of the one he (came to love) up the stairs, onto the streets, and into the graveyard.  Certainly not then.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Giving Up We Do Invisibly

_“[Threshold gifts] are meant to make visible the giving up we do invisibly.”–Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World_

 

To be utterly without conditions is impossible, but John knows forbearance better than most.

It’s a gift. He doesn’t remember where he got it.

It wasn’t at school; it wasn’t in church; it wasn’t while he mooned into the middle distance over his first love, or bent over dissections or surgeries or the casualties of war.  It wasn’t when he broke and followed the long-legged, eminent stalk of the one he (came to love) up the stairs, onto the streets, and into the graveyard.  Certainly not then.

It wasn’t at lunch. It wasn’t at a crossroads tricked out like a lab. (Wasn’t it? _You have no idea_.) 

It isn’t when he thinks about how they were twined.

We don’t choose these things, he thinks, which shoulder we’re shot in ,the neighborhoods in which we’re abandoned, the scenes we’re called upon to witness, the way our affections don’t mind the tape, and walk on through. When you leave behind what’s broken, you’ve got only what you owe.

And what you are owed. Forgiveness is a country built on token and remembrance.

So when Sherlock trails back to him across the frontiers, John asks him only, _and_ _what have you brought me?_

We ought not to have them, these transactions with grace--but his hands, and his heart, say _, this is your birthday._

**Author's Note:**

> “Even if such miracles are rare,it is still true that lifelessness leaves the soul when a gift comes towards us, for gift property serves as an upward force, the goodwill or virtu of nature, the soul, and the collective.”—Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property


End file.
